June 6, 2013

Columbia Business School Launches Entrepreneurs Lab

The Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School has announced the creation a new space designed to support student entrepreneurs across the entire campus. Known as Columbia Entrepreneurs Lab, this cooperative working space will be available free of charge to students accepted into the new program.

More than a dozen entrepreneurs will serve as the inaugural class for the Lab. Participants will have access to practical resources and mentorship opportunities that will help them launch new ventures in a variety of fields—from healthcare to environmental protection, to media and entertainment.

One of the proposed ventures uses cutting-edge language processing combined with a 3D graphics engine to create a rendering of any scene based purely on a person’s words. Dubbed WordsEye by its creators, the technology recently claimed the $100,000 grand prize in the fourth annual New York Business Plan Competition.

“The Entrepreneurship Lab is a collaboration between multiple schools across campus and an important milestone in Columbia University’s efforts to prioritize the importance of entrepreneurship programming for all Columbia entrepreneurs,” says Professor Murray Low, director of the Lang Center.

“Our goal in launching the lab was to provide a cooperative space that could serve as an incubator to some of the many impactful ideas housed in the minds of Columbia community members.”

Columbia Business School alumnus Derek Lee ’08 is one of the lead facilitators of the program. “I think this class of entrepreneurs provides a solid start to the CEL initiative,” he says. “Our goal is to provide them with skills and perhaps more importantly, experiences they can bring with them into the fall.”